34

Rose Garden: the women here are all freelancers. You could say the semiliterate Thai owners of the bar showed the kind of commercial foresight for which business school graduates pray: they decided to allow single women to sit at the bar or at the tables all day and most of the night for the price of a single coffee or an orange juice. The standard travel books duly warned of a small army of impecunious, unscrupulous whores-not all of them young, either-not disciplined by employers or pimps, untraceable and unaccountable should the john wake up in his hotel room in the middle of the night to find both woman and wallet gone. Naturally, the result was a somewhat larger army of curious farang men who spent a great deal of money buying themselves and the women drinks in their earnest desire to find out just how unscrupulous these girls really were. Within a couple of years the result was a roaringly successful cooperative enterprise housed in a barnlike compound upon which the owners lavish nothing in the way of decor, although the Buddha shrine is one of the largest in the entertainment industry.

Now here is Salee making her way toward me through the dense fauna of men in the forty-to-infinity age range, squeezing past women spectacularly well turned out in those designer rip-offs your government is so hysterically upset about. (In the karma of crap the fakes are indistinguishable from the originals.) Creedence Clearwater Revival are playing “Have You Ever Seen the Rain,” only faintly audible against the great mating chorus all around. As I gaze across this heaving global marketplace, I note that more and more women are streaming in through the doors. Charm is automatically switched to full alert as they make their way through the crowd. Salee, though, has been here for a few hours and has grown a little despondent. She has been a freelancer since my mother sacked her last year for getting outrageously drunk and dancing naked on the bar before passing out on one of the benches. Like all great bar owners, Mum has a puritanical streak.

“How’s business?” I ask with a smile, automatically ordering a double tequila.

Salee makes a face as she downs it in one. “I’m getting old, Sonchai. I’m twenty-nine this month. These younger girls are doing two, three, sometimes four tricks a night. That’s about a hundred and fifty U.S. dollars just for lying down for twenty minutes four times a night. Thing is, they’re not like my generation. They don’t just turn a trick, then go get drunk with their mates in a Thai bar-they come back here again and again, so each girl can account for four johns. They’re not like whores, they’re young businesswomen, and they’re cleaning up. Some of them have web pages, the john sends them e-mails, and they meet him at the airport. They’ve got the whole business sewn up. It doesn’t leave anything for the rest of us. It’s not fair.”

“Want me to ask Nong to take you back? She will if I tell her to.”

I order another double tequila, which she quickly drinks. Shaking her head: “No, frankly she was right to sack me. I’m at that age, you know, when I’m not going to get along with any mamasan or papasan. You really need to be freelance by the time you hit thirty. It’s not just the wrinkles around your eyes or the way your tits start to droop, it’s the whole way you hold yourself. Even the dumbest john gets the message: This is not a girl, this is a woman. And they come for girls.”

“How long since you had a customer?”

A sheepish grin. “This afternoon.” Laughing: “But that just proves what I’m saying. I can’t compete with the younger women, so I have to get here around midday, while they’re still asleep.”

“Any Asian men come these days? I don’t see too many.”

She makes a quick scan of my face but decides not to ask: “A few. Koreans come from time to time, and just recently there have been two Vietnamese men-big guys with tons of muscles, I guess they’re half American, from the war. They were here earlier-they took out two of the girls. Maybe they’ll be back.”

“No Japs?”

“Very, very few. They tend to go for the Japanese clubs on Soi 39-but why am I telling you that?”

“I’m looking for an unusual Japanese male, late twenties to mid-thirties-a tattooist.” A shrug. “He has a stutter but speaks Thai. Probably a serious loner.”

Another shrug. “I’m not the best girl to ask. Asian men don’t like me-look, I’m tall for a Thai. You know the golden rule.”

“Always be smaller than the john.”

“Want me to ask Tuk? She’s petite, Asian men love her. I think she does Japs from time to time. I don’t know if she’s with a john or not right now, though.”

Surreptitiously, I pass Salee a hundred-baht note. She squeezes my hand and slips off the barstool. I order another double tequila and let it sit on the counter, waiting for her. There are women sitting on the stools to my left and right, but they are with customers whom they have begun to mesmerize with expert strokes to the crotch-just like Vikorn catching fish.

The crowd is so dense, Salee has disappeared in less than a minute. When she ceases to surface, I assume she has been distracted by a john and start to gaze about for a better contact. Then suddenly two hands are tickling me from behind. Salee is standing grinning with her friend Tuk. I order another tequila for Tuk, who downs it in one in synchronization with Salee.

“A Japanese tattooist,” I explain again, “with a stutter. Maybe one of those Japs who can’t talk to people-a high-tech type?”

Tuk really wants to help. She frowns in concentration. “A tattooist? Does he have tattoos himself?”

“Full body except face, hands, and feet.”

“Including cock?”

“I don’t want to go off the subject,” I explain, and order more tequila.

“I don’t know if it would turn me on or not,” Salee muses. “You’d at least want to make it big, just so you could see the picture. It must be a bit like a video game.”

I finish my beer and order another. The alcohol must have loosened something in my brain, which finally remembers how to be indirect.

“Know a girl called Dao? She’s on the Game.”

“I know about a dozen.”

“She has very unusual tattoos-dragons across her navel and two dragons on her backside.”

Tuk stares at me. “That Dao? Sure, I know her. I used to share a room with her-there were five of us so it was pretty crowded, and I saw her undress every night. Amazing tats. Some of the other girls wanted the same, but she wouldn’t say who did them. She was going with a Japanese john who made her have them. She charged him twice as much afterward-four thousand baht for short time, eight thousand for all night.”

“Did you ever meet the john?”

“No. It was very secret. I think he worked here in Krung Thep, you know, and probably had a wife and kids as well.”

Suddenly Salee breaks into rapid Isaan, the language of the far Northeast, which is closer to Lao than Thai. I’m unable to follow and watch while light dawns on Tuk’s face and both girls begin to giggle. When they stop, they stare at me, then start to giggle again.

“Sorry,” Salee says. “It’s a bit embarrassing. You know the Game, Sonchai, you know how working girls go crazy from time to time-I mean, crazy?”

She is being coy, and I’m trying to discern her meaning. “I don’t follow.”

“Sure you do. You must have seen it thousands of times. A girl gets tired of being the sex slave-she wants a sex slave of her own from time to time. Last Christmas, Tuk and I made a lot of money out of some big fat Germans who were pretty domineering and ugly too, so we decided to splash out on a couple of pretty Thai boys from the gay bars off Surawong. It was to compensate and get our own back, you know how it goes.”

Tuk takes up the story. “We went to about five bars before we found a couple of boys we wanted. We took them back to our room and shared them-we smoked some yaa baa so we could make them work all night and get our money’s worth, but that’s not what you want to know about. While we were touring the gay bars, we saw an awful lot of tattoos-”